One Door From Heaven

fashion that his presumed grandfather displayed when, in those movie moments of high jeopardy, he had said, Dang, we better skedaddle. This Gabby moves fast in a skedaddle, but he keeps stopping to look back, waving his gun, as if he expects to discover a villain of one kind or another looming point-blank over him every time he turns.
        Curtis wants to scream Move-move-move, but Gabby is probably an ornery cuss who always does things his way and who won't react well to instruction.
        Though the search squads must be pouring out of the helicopter, there's no light to the south, where they landed. They're conducting a natural-conditions exploration, because they believe that their high-tech gear makes darkness their friend.
        In addition to the buildings, commotion screens Curtis, too, makes it more difficult for the hunters to read his special energy signature, and there's going to be plenty of commotion coming in mere seconds.
        In fact, it starts with screaming. The shrieks of a grown man reduced by terror to the condition of a small child.
        Gabby hitches to a halt again and squints back along the route they followed, his pistol jabbing this and that way as he seeks a threat.
        Clutching the caretaker by the arm, Curtis urges him onward.
        Towards the south end of town, two men are screaming. Now three or even four. How suddenly the horror struck, and how rapidly it escalates.
        "Criminy! What's that?" Gabby wonders, his voice quaking.
        Curtis tugs at him, and the caretaker starts to move again, but then the screams are punctuated by the rattle and crack of automatic-weapons fire.
        "The fools blastin' at each other'?"
        "Go, go, go," Curtis demands, guided now by panic that overrides all sense of diplomacy, trying to muscle the old man into motion once more.
        Men being torn apart, men being gutted, men being eaten alive would scream no more chillingly than this.
        In skittles and lurches, the caretaker heads north again, Curtis at his side rather than behind him, the dog preceding them, as if, by some psychic perception, she knows where to find the barn-what-ain't-a-barn.
        With only half the town behind them, as they arrive at another passageway between buildings, a strange light flares to their right, out in the street, framed for their view by a tunnel of plank walls. Sapphire and scintillant, as brief as fireworks, it twice pulses, the way that a luminous jellyfish propels itself through the sea. Out of the subsequent gloom, while a negative image of the pyrotechnic burst still blossoms like a black flower in Curtis's vision, a smoldering dark mass hurtles from the street into the passage, tumbling end-over-end toward them.
        Spry but graceless in the manner of a marionette jerked backward on its control strings, all bony shoulders and sharp elbows and knobby knees, Gabby springs out of the way with surprising alacrity. Curtis jukes, and the dog bolts for cover.
        With shot-out-of-a-cannon velocity, a stone-dead man caroms off the flanking buildings, extremities noisily flailing the palisades of the narrow passageway, as though he's the apparition in a high-speed seance, rapping out a dire warning from the Other Side. He bursts into the open and explodes past Curtis. A lightning-struck scarecrow, spat out by a raging tornado, could not have been cast off with any greater force than this, and the carcass finally comes to rest in the tattered, bristling, yet boneless posture of a cast-down cornfield guardian. The steaming stink of him, however, is indescribably worse than a scarecrow's wet straw, moldering clothes, and moth-infested flour-sack face.
        On the victim's sprung chest, scorched and wrinkled but still readable, a large white F and a large white I bracket the missing, blown-out B.
        Ornery cuss or not, arthritic or not, the grizzled caretaker recognizes big trouble when he sees it, and he finds in himself the comparatively more youthful energy and nimbleness that his famous elder had shown in earlier films like Bells of Rosarita and The Arizona Kid. He sets out spang for the barn, as if challenging the dog to a race, and Curtis hurries after him, playing the sidekick's sidekick.
        Screams, anxious shouts, and gunfire echo among the buildings, and then comes an eerie sound-priong, priong, priong, priong-such as the stiff steel tines of a garden rake might produce if they